1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to improvements in an image recording/reproducing apparatus and method capable of simultaneously handling a recording medium loadable in the apparatus, such as an optical disk, and a recording medium built in the apparatus, such as a hard disk.
2. Description of the Related Art
As is well known, an image recording/reproducing apparatus has recently been developed, which is capable of simultaneously handling a recording medium loadable in the apparatus, such as optical disks including a DVD (Digital Versatile Disk)-RAM (Random Access Memory) and a DVD-RW (ReWritable), and a large-capacity recording medium with a high recording/reproducing speed, such as a hard disk, which is built in the apparatus.
In this type of image recording/reproducing apparatus, the advantages of optical disks and the advantages of hard disks are organically combined. Thus, it is potentially capable of offering to users various new functions, which could not be realized by conventional image recording/reproducing apparatuses. Under the circumstances, at present, there is a strong demand for improvements in the details of this type of image recording/reproducing apparatus, thereby to make the apparatus more useful without problems.
For example, there is known a so-called just-recording function as a function of recording image information in a recording medium. In the just-recording function, the amount of image information to be recorded is controlled using compression encoding techniques in accordance with an empty recording capacity of the recording medium. Thereby, all the recording capacity of the recording medium is used up, without leaving any useless empty recording capacity.
When the just-recording function is adopted in the above-described image recording/reproducing apparatus capable of simultaneously handling the optical disk and hard disk, there is no particular problem with the optical disk. However, as regards the hard disk, there is a case where the empty recording capacity is 100 G (Giga) bytes or more. If image information was encoded in accordance with such an enormous empty recording capacity, the stream data size would disadvantageously be increased uselessly and practical processing could not be carried out.
The present invention has been made in consideration of the above circumstances, and its object is to provide an image recording/reproducing apparatus and method capable of simultaneously handling a recording medium loadable in the apparatus and a recording medium built in the apparatus, wherein disadvantages of a large-capacity recording medium at the time of adopting a just-recording function are eliminated, and the operability for users is improved.